Connected Vehicles
by Akiro
Autonomous vehicles, which was a buzz word some time back, is now a reality. Although they don’t have a high market share currently, they have been commercialized showing the way forward to adoption of this technology. Autonomous vehicles have shown a huge application of Artificial Intelligence and might be considered to be at the forefront of the connected vehicles use case, there is yet another segment of vehicles which has proven to be a great example of connected devices at scale. This is the Electric Vehicles segment, which is growing exponentially and will continue to do so in the next few years. The transition from Internal Combustion engines to Electric batteries is taking place at an unprecedented pace.
While both Electric Vehicles and Autonomous vehicles require to be connected over the internet, Autonomous vehicles require some additional components such as Computer vision, Sensor fusion, Localization, Path planning and Control. Thus, both these categories come under the bigger IoT ecosystem that is taking the world by storm.
Although self-driving cars are still not able to match the skills of a Human driver, it is expected to be better than human driving in the next few years. In order for autonomous driving to improve, it needs a lot of continuous inputs from other connected vehicles and a network of 5G service for higher bandwidth and lower latencies. Latency is one of the most important parameters for Autonomous vehicles which requires prompt decision making.
Akiro is one of the major IoT platforms in the world that is built with the idea of enabling 10’s of millions of concurrent connections at the millisecond level latencies. Akiro not only provides a platform for the communication between the connected vehicles, it also comes with Live Tracking and Navigation capabilities along with Low-code Rules engine and Analytics & Reporting dashboards.
Ingestion
Akiro has already built a solution for Electric Vehicles to collect data from various vehicle batteries as well as from the Charging/ swapping stations using the OCPP, MQTT and other communication protocols and is developing the solution for the Autonomous vehicles. These Autonomous connected vehicles need a vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communication at a high scale and Ultralow-latencies that can be achieved using Akiro.
As these connected vehicles maintain a constant connection with a lot of other similar vehicles over the internet and also keep assessing the road conditions, road signage, traffic conditions, wrong side drivers on a real-time basis, they communicate those details to the other connected vehicles based on their GPS location. This helps build a collected network of not only the connected vehicles but also other infrastructure such as Smart traffic lights, toll plazas, hospitals, restaurants, etc.
Akiro can provide a single platform to enable communication with all such connected devices as it has previously solved some of the use cases in the Smart city & Telematics domain and carries the capabilities of Live Tracking, Location history and Navigation. We have already proven integration capabilities with the major map service providers in the world.
Additional features such as Asset Hierarchy, Multi-tenancy, Sandbox and User management along with the above mentioned capabilities and the scale that can be achieved makes it highly suitable for the various connected vehicles use cases that can further be developed on top of our existing platform. Moreover, the Akiro platform is built in the form of microservices which makes it much easier for the developers to create a solution.
Preprocessing, Alerting and Monitoring
Autonomous vehicles require a lot of rules to be created along with the Machine Learning algorithms such as a maximum limit on vehicle speed, a minimum distance that needs to be maintained with other objects, minimum fuel level required as threshold, upcoming service requirement based on the OBD data, etc. Additionally, it might include raising an alert to multiple stakeholders such as a hospital and the traffic control authorities in case an accident is detected.
For a large number of rules to be created, it is very important that the rules are easy to create and modify. Low-code Rules engine, a part of Akiro offering, helps the user easily create a rule within seconds and its schema-less design also allows users to effortlessly modify/ alter these rules.
Apart from the rules engine, it also comes with Triggers and Schedulers that can be used to generate an Alert in case an anomaly is detected based on the established rules, for eg, send an alert if the fuel level goes below 20% and suggest a nearby refilling station. These features also help in regularly monitoring the health of the equipment and schedule certain actions on a regular basis.
Insights
Data Analytics is the most important aspect for the Autonomous vehicles that use Machine Learning algorithms to make instantaneous decisions. The collection and Analysis of data in real-time from the network of connected vehicles will help in Automatic route planning, redirecting traffic from congested areas, adaptive cruise control and fewer accidents due to better information of the road conditions. To achieve these objectives, it is quite important to collect the right Analytical data points/ parameters and use them in the most efficient manner.
While the business decision on the parameters that need to be provided has to be taken by the product owner developing the Autonomous vehicles use case, Akiro can provide its support in making it easier for the product owner to make the right decisions.
Akiro provides a platform to create customizable Analytics dashboards within a few minutes that allows the business user to experiment with the various graphs and charts and choose the ones that are important to the use case. Further, it provides seamless integration of data with the downstream members, such as decision makers and Machine learning algorithms, thus allowing the relevant data to be available to different stakeholders at the right time.
